Jeremy’s Tophunder №100: Rush Hour

5 min readApr 12, 2020

So, this is the 25th movie recap that I’ve published so far. If I’m giving you my Tophunder favorite movies, I figure a quarter of the way through the project is a good time to give you the cut-off line.

In fact, for a minute I considered titling the project “The 99 Movies I Like Better Than Rush Hour.”

Rush Hour holds a special place in my heart. I watched it -a lot- growing up. My parents were (reasonably) strict when it came to the movies I was allowed to rent when we went to Blockbuster or wherever else — I wasn’t allowed to rent PG-13 movies until I was probably 12 or 13 (sometimes they made exceptions if I was with a friend so I wouldn’t seem like a huge loser). But when I went with a friend with more lenient parents, we went straight for the good stuff.

“The good stuff” meaning movies with nudity, usually.

But Rush Hour was high in the rotation as well. I can remember many, many sleepovers that consisted of going over to a friend’s house, renting Rush Hour, watching Rush Hour, ordering pizza, and then playing N64 until we literally fell asleep with the controllers still in our hands.

Rush Hour was my favorite movie ever at one point. It’s the first movie that made me feel cool to say it was my favorite. All of my friends’ favorite movies were Star Wars or Jurassic Park or something. I stood apart. I liked being able to say that my favorite movie was a Jackie Chan movie. It made me feel more interesting.

Granted, I know now that Rush Hour probably isn’t even one of the 20 best Jackie Chan movies, but, given that it was his first major success in the U.S. market, it still seems vaguely relevant from a historical perspective. I wouldn’t say that I’m a connoisseur of martial arts movies by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say that Jackie Chan (via Rush Hour) got me more interested in the genre.

There were a number of martial arts movies that I considered for the Top 100 before ultimately cutting them; Kung Fu Hustle, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Drunken Master, Enter The Dragon, Rumble in the Bronx, Police Story, Shaolin Temple, and Hero were all on my expanded list of the 300-odd movies I started this project with. Ultimately, they didn’t make the cut, but I wanted to make sure to have some piece of them represented in some way. And I also love this breakdown of Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong action comedies that I couldn’t figure out how else to bring up.

And you know what? Rush Hour still kind of holds up. Sure, it’s vaguely racist for a moment or two, but other than that, it’s a decent action comedy. Is Brett Ratner (who directed it) a repulsive douchebag that behaves in a grossly inappropriate manner around women? According to everything that I’ve read on the matter, yes. But Rush Hour certainly feels more like a Jackie Chan movie masquerading as an American Buddy-Cop movie than the other way around. Most of the action/fight sequences look a lot more like Jackie’s early work in Hong Kong rather than his later, poorly-directed work in Hollywood.

That being said, Jackie Chan doesn’t like the movie. He’s expressed disappointment with his English language skills in the movie (although I’ve always thought it was fine), and that there aren’t enough fight sequences for his liking (which I understand and possibly agree with). That said, he obviously liked it enough to make two sequels, so I suppose we take that with a grain of salt.

Here’s the biggest legacy of Rush Hour, though: One of the founders of Rotten Tomatoes is named Senh Duong, and he was a big fan of Jackie Chan. His original goal was to provide aggregate reviews of Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong-produced movies as they were released in the United States. What ultimately got the site live was Rush Hour, Chan’s first major crossover into Hollywood. The site was an overnight success and has now, for all intents and purposes, become the gold standard for movie reviews in the United States. So, even if you don’t like Rush Hour, you can still be thankful that it’s the primary reason that Rotten Tomatoes exists today.

Rush Hour is occasionally funny with good-not-great action sequences, and really good chemistry between Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. It also gets decent (but albeit cliche) performances out of Tom Wilkinson and Ken Leung, and has some great work from noted That Guys Mark Rolston, Phillip Baker Hall, and the late, great Chris Penn. Is some of it ridiculous? Absolutely. But as the Every Frame A Painting clip points out (linked again, because it really is that good), Jackie Chan usually earns that ridiculous ending. Is it a good movie? No. Is it a classic? No. Is it very emblematic of the time it’s genre from it’s time period? Absolutely. Did I watch it too many times growing up? Almost certainly. There’s just a ton of nostalgia wrapped up in Rush Hour for me. Ultimately, there were enough times that I asked myself “do I like this movie more than Rush Hour?” where the answer was no that I realized it had to make the list, just barely.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

27. All The President’s Men